Retired lawyer in Halifax revives long-silent Bay State Guitars brand

Wednesday

Dec 30, 2009 at 12:01 AMDec 30, 2009 at 6:36 PM

Nearly a century after the company exited the guitar business, a recent transplant to Massachusetts is reviving the Bay State brand. Sylvan Wells of Halifax is making custom-made Bay State Guitars and selling them at a Pembroke music shop and on his Web site.

Steve Adams

Strumming an acoustic parlor guitar was one way to liven up an evening at home in the unplugged era before radio, TV and the Internet.

In many homes, the instrument was a Bay State guitar built by John C. Haynes & Co. of Boston, then one of the nation’s pre-eminent instrument manufacturers.

Nearly a century after the company exited the guitar business, a recent transplant to Massachusetts is reviving the Bay State brand.

Sylvan Wells of Halifax is making custom-made Bay State Guitars and selling them at a Pembroke music shop and on his Web site.

“The idea was: What if Bay State had not gone out of business in 1911?” Wells said. “What if they had continued? What would they be building today?”

A 63-year-old Daytona Beach, Fla., native, Wells played guitar for The Nightcrawlers, a 1960s rock band that had a brush with fame with a Top 100 single, “Little Black Egg.”

The band members, all junior college students at the time, split up after graduation, and Wells hung up his Gibson and moved on to a different stage as a trial lawyer in the 1970s.

But his rock background kept luring him back to music shops where he took an interest in guitar-making.

Largely self-taught, he’s built about 300 stringed instruments over the last three decades, a hobby that he’s had more time to pursue since his retirement six years ago. He saves his most unusual designs for national gatherings of custom guitar-makers, such as the model he crafted from a 2-by-10 from Home Depot.

Wells said he let his instincts as a guitarist guide his design.

“I didn’t have any training the way people always did it through the millennium,” he said. “I looked at the guitar and said, ‘How can you build this properly? What are the things I hate as a player?’”

Many guitar necks are glued to the body, causing the instrument to warp over time from the pressure exerted by the guitarist. Repairs can cost $1,000.

Wells’ guitars have a mechanical neck joint for a quick and inexpensive repair job. Frets are recessed so they don’t irritate players’ fingers.

After he and his wife moved to Massachusetts in 2007, Wells’ thoughts turned to the history of Bay State Guitars, whose models he had seen in second-hand shops. The instruments were manufactured by John C. Haynes & Co. from 1865 until 1911.

Wells determined that no contemporary company was using the name and bought the rights to the Web site at baystateguitar.com.

Wells has formed an association with Richard Eriksson, a retired engineer who opened a music shop called Re-Tunes in a Pembroke strip mall this year and agreed to become the exclusive local distributor of Bay State guitars.

“They’ll sit down and play one of those Bay States and they’re fascinated with how such a small guitar can have such big sound,” Ericksson said of his clientele.

Wells is selling his custom-built models at $3,000, a price that is designed to be competitive with mainstream competitors such as Martin Guitars. One of his first customers was Donnie Herron, a member of Bob Dylan’s band.

Wells is active in the community of luthiers, the term that refers to makers of stringed instruments, lecturing on the subject since 1992.

Four times a year, he teaches a 10-day, one-on-one course on guitar-making. He has noticed a surge of interest in recent years, comparing it to the build-your-own-amplifier craze of the 1960s.

Wells might never have pursued the craft if it wasn’t for the admonition of an Orlando guitar repairman who said a 10-year apprenticeship was needed to build a guitar.

Wells bet him $20 it didn’t, then researched books on guitar-making and bought the raw materials from a New Hampshire luthier. “It was pretty crude but it played in tune, and that $2,000 investment got me my $20 back,” he said.

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